Network-informed suicide prevention

At 7 Cups, suicide prevention is often thought of as something other people do. In this Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, an important research paper points the way towards a new approach to suicide prevention in schools and other educational settings: network-informed suicide prevention.

But social networking is something we do! Could this be a new way for 7 Cups to make a meaningful contribution to saving lives?

This study extends prior work in youth suicide prevention by identifying characteristics of protective school networks and, conversely, school networks that increase risk for [suicidal thoughts and behaviors].

What are these characteristics?

Our findings...showed [suicide attempt] rates higher in schools where youth trusted adult relationships were concentrated in fewer students...

Or to put that the other way around, schools where more of the students had trusting relationships with the adults were the schools where there were fewer suicide attempts.

And then:

Students with more friendship ties and who were part of larger, interconnected friendship groups were less likely to report [suicidal thoughts] and [suicide attempts]; those indices aggregated at the school population level predicted lower school rates of [suicidal thoughts and behaviors].

This means that in schools where there were many interconnected friendship groups, the students in those groups were individually protected, and the whole school was also protected.

There were other conclusions in this complex paper, but these were the ones that I thought could be significant for 7 Cups. Two challenging thoughts:

• Do we have enough adult teen listeners (ATLs: only around 100 of us were active in the last week)? Can we somehow use our ATLs in a different way to give more teens relationships with trusted adults?
• Do we promote real-life interconnected friendship groups enough? Can we somehow encourage this kind of offsite contact (without risking stranger danger) in order to give more teens the experience of real-life connected networks?

Full-text research paper: Peer-adult network structure and suicide attempts in 38 high schools: implications for network-informed suicide prevention

Shorter summary: How Social Dynamics at School Impact Teen Suicide

Charlie